Antonioni centenary essays

All this testifies to a deep, mysterious, and – at times – great intensity in the formal idea that excites the fantasy of Antonioni. We’re really sorry but an unexpected error has occurred We’re sure it’s not your fault and would like to ask you to try again. Peter Bondanella, Indiana University

﻿Antonioni: Centenary Essays is an exemplary model for writing on cinema and modernity, a timely occasion for rethinking media reception in the twenty-first century through revaluation of Antonioni’s films. This description is very precise in emphasising the shift from a “distressingly real” worker’s face to the sheer abstraction of a coloured line. This is the key reason why Antonioni’s cinema is ultimately not only of no solace when it comes to religious or metaphysical perspectives, but is also very difficult if we look for clear-cut political advocacy. Each shot in L’eclisse, for example, has an undeniable solidity and clarity in its rendering of a specific material reality within Roma’s various inner and outer regions (plus the small Verona airport where Vittoria enjoys a lyrical interlude), all the time emanating ambiguity’s ubiquitous vapours. Gradually, Claudia comes to replace her both as Sandro’s girlfriend and the film’s chief protagonist. ‘Antonioni: Centenary Essays is an exemplary model for writing on cinema and modernity, a timely occasion for.

Even where we might seek to order and explain the filmic reality in front of us as accessing our protagonist’s psyche, she is concurrently never more in doubt or felt as so directly borne of the film’s unique formal construction. (36) Yet emphasis on this cinema’s fundamentally technological and formal, seemingly less ‘human’, dimensions should not entirely override the complicating fact that there are a great many crucial moments throughout these films where the viewer can seem to feel Claudia, Lidia, Vittoria or Giuliana as within reach. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, trans. By connecting Antonioni’s cinematic representation of the Aeolian islands with an aesthetic mode of thinking about and picturing the Italian landscape in the eighteenth century, Galt reveals the film as being inherently concerned with the evolving status of the image in modernity. Edited by Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes (British Film Institute / Palgrave MacMillan. The last film famously visualises the world it portrays as rather uninhabitable, environmentally but also conceptually, for the humans who build and administer it. Whatever the given shot’s precise formal characteristics, the precise nature of human bodies’ placement within their surrounding world, be it nature or built environment, is crucial. Some kind of lingering leftism is often faintly invoked, but it usually comes across as out-of-step with – or impotent in the face of – a resurgent capitalist Italy reaching prominence as an increasingly significant European economic and political power. The spatial, aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of this encounter are soon revealed in the image above. While the viewer can interpret her apparent pleasure at this hermetic, private encounter away from the decadent upper-class gathering, La notte’s notional female protagonist and her problems have been so little fleshed out in the film – now nearing its end – that our attention to both narrative and character development risks badly drifting from already very unstable moorings when denied dialogue in this formally very beautiful scene. This is the key reason why Antonioni’s cinema is ultimately not only of no solace when it comes to religious or metaphysical perspectives, but is also very difficult if we look for clear-cut political advocacy. Yet the realist-modernist fusion of Antonioni’s early-’60s films at the same time entirely fails to support the ontological inscribing of subjectivity and its gaze.

In each of these films, it is the image’s particular material-aesthetic autonomy that is a crucial part of this cinema’s distinction. When it comes to his cited preference for modernity, perhaps the distinction or justification for the viewer in this case becomes that the human element which moves us is less the architects and designers of Ravenna’s factories than the artistry responsible for Il deserto rosso, both behind the camera and in the form of Monica Vitti as Giuliana, its crisis-ridden protagonist. To treat alienation in any kind of universalising way is a problem (especially in light of the bourgeois socio-economic milieu privileged in Antonioni’s work), but so is being too sure about its implications, how it plays out, and even what it means. Il deserto rosso’s first few images following the credits are the most extreme, almost science fiction-like post-apocalyptic example of this. ”(7) The spatial, temporal, and experiential conditions of modern Italy become these films’ prime visual concern – a singular reality impossible to epistemologically define and understand. Arguing against critical views of Antonioni as an anti-humanist filmmaker who treated actors as mere elements of the mise-en-scène, David Forgacs inquires into his directorial practice to re-establish the centrality of acting and performance to his aesthetics. She is also much more intimately felt than the often heavily archetypal, non-individuated characters of neorealism. Leonardo Quaresima objects to the ‘minor status’ assigned to the documentaries made during the 1940s, and demonstrates their autonomy as aesthetically mature works. The last film famously visualises the world it portrays as rather uninhabitable, environmentally but also conceptually, for the humans who build and administer it.

To treat alienation in any kind of universalising way is a problem (especially in light of the bourgeois socio-economic milieu privileged in Antonioni’s work), but so is being too sure about its implications, how it plays out, and even what it means. Marcia Landy, University of Pittsburgh Read more. Initially seeming to conclude the remarkable sequence by further enforcing abstraction, when Corrado wanders into this striking installation-like composition from the back of the frame, dwarfed by his surroundings, we are reminded that such a futuristic-meets-historical environment is in fact the same confusing reality within which the human figures live. Describing what he sees as the central contradiction and enabling antinomy of modernist works, P. Buy Antonioni: Centenary Essays by Laura Rascaroli, John David Rhodes (ISBN: 9781844573844) from Amazon's Book Store. Pascal Bonitzer, “The Disappearance on Antonioni”, trans. Objectivity, Deleuze writes, is “formed through becoming mental, and going into a strange, invisible subjectivity of feelings which go from the objective to the subjective, and are internalised in everyone. Its English translation first appeared in Film Culture no. Moving between both spaces, our protagonist also lives in the EUR and seems slightly more comfortable there. Michelangelo Antonioni, The Architecture of Vision: Writings and Interviews on Cinema eds. ”(14) Yet while treatment of this once very familiar and arguably oversimplified trope as the key to understanding Antonioni’s most influential work can easily have the effect of curtailing the films’ thematic suggestiveness, social critique, aesthetic form, affective impact, and their place within an Italian historical and political context, there remains a more precise historical reason for its application. Yet in the process we can also easily underplay the radical impact of the director’s formal and aesthetic innovations.

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The price is a debilitating, if in many ways familiar, one exemplifying modern experience itself: the undermining of surety and purpose. Recensione ﻿The contributors to Antonioni: Centenary Essays approach the director’s works with fresh, new inspiration and contemporary critical methodologies that. In Theory of Film, Siegfried Kracauer characteristically describes “the tremendous importance of objects,” writing that “the actor too is no more than a detail, a fragment of the matter of the world,” and pointing out the potential in showing “real life complexes which the conventional figure-ground patterns usually conceal from view. Save this on Delicious | Tweet this. Through what can appear a kind of neo-expressionism, a sense of protagonistic intensity is here at a dual apogee and crisis point from which it will not recover. To confront this challenge the director explores everyday reality’s uncanny and sometimes bizarre appearance as powered by rapid economic, technological and environmental change – including, and as reforged by, the image – in sustained and diverse portrayals of this modern world’s physical and perceptual conditions. But she doesn’t know how exactly to utilise this freedom, if not wishing to become a fully paid-up follower of what appears the default modern religion of market capitalism.

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, trans. ”(5) He later quotes a passage from Maurice Blanchot that illustrates the resulting material, aesthetic, and conceptual reality: “(P)resent in its absence, graspable because ungraspable, appearing as disappeared. JOHN DAVID RHODES is ﻿is Senior Lecturer in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex. Benci thus investigates the evolution of the image of Rome in Antonioni’s films, up to and including Tentato suicidio (1953), drawing attention to aspects of dialectical engagement with the neo-realist tradition. The compelling essays, written by leading film scholars, challenge time-worn assessments of Antonioni’s cinema, and situate their discussions in relation to aesthetics, film history, the character and specificity of the connections of his work to other media, and innovatively and significantly, to ecology (space, climate, and waste) as illuminative of his visual style. Rather than continuing debates concerning metaphysical schemas of religious or secular values, Antonioni’s cinema is concerned with larger yet also more quotidian forces.

To treat alienation in any kind of universalising way is a problem (especially in light of the bourgeois socio-economic milieu privileged in Antonioni’s work), but so is being too sure about its implications, how it plays out, and even what it means. Antonioni: Centenary Essays is an exemplary model for writing on cinema and modernity, a timely occasion for rethinking media reception in the twenty-first century through revaluation of Antonioni’s films. Chris Beyer, Gavriel Moses, and Seymour Chatman, in Seymour Chatman and Guido Fink eds. We’re really sorry but an unexpected error has occurred We’re sure it’s not your fault and would like to ask you to try again. Such rendering of form and experience via a medium reflexively acknowledging its own crucial role in the re-conceiving of reality as inextricably marked by radically enhanced ambiguity is arguably the central event offered by this cinema. , or by their respective licensors, or by the publishers, or by their respective licensors. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, trans.

The contributors to this volume argue for an understanding of his work in a variety of new contexts: transnational cinema; conceptual photography; intermediality; thing theory; ecological and climate change theory; rubbish theory; microhistorical urbanism; the theory of the picturesque; and the theory of style. Gradually, Claudia comes to replace her both as Sandro’s girlfriend and the film’s chief protagonist. The apogee of Antonioni’s heroines in this regard, Vittoria is an apparent beneficiary of Italy’s post-war economic boom (we glean that her family has poorer origins) and the expanded personal freedoms afforded a new middle class less tethered to the traditions of family and Church than was the case for women and men of the pre- and immediate post-war periods. In Il provino, an episode of I tre volti (1965), Antonioni foregrounds the artificiality of the work of art by making the spectator aware of the dynamics of mediation governing the pro-filmic event. The crucial abstract, ineffable aesthetic-experiential dimension of Antonioni’s cinema is not, however, ultimately in contradiction with the fact that it emerges from precise historical conditions and maps a very specific human reality with considerable responsibility. But such immediate tweaking of the sound-image into an authored or socio-historically revealing text to be read not only involves consciously felt hermeneutic work. As viewers of Antonioni’s films, our engagement with the world as presented on screen is one in which – to once more utilise Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological language, so suggestive of cinema’s virtual power – “the mind goes out through the eyes to wander among objects.

, Film Theory and Criticism 4th edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. He is a founding co-editor of the journal World Picture. “By tying perception to the actual shape and status of the external world,” Rohdie writes, Antonioni “made them both equally subject of his films, and equally ambiguous and tenuous. The result is a very challenging ambiguity. The text is divided into four sections, with Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes providing an overall introduction that also comprises a brief summary of the conceptual terms by which Antonioni’s work has been both enthusiastically acclaimed as well as harshly criticised. This is made possible partly by the immanent, far from rarefied on-screen reality that floods these films, incorporating a very real post-war Italy. The compelling essays, written by leading film scholars, challenge time-worn assessments of Antonioni’s cinema, and situate their discussions in relation to aesthetics, film history, the character and specificity of the connections of his work to other media, and innovatively and significantly, to ecology (space, climate, and waste) as illuminative of his visual style. (4) As I hope will become apparent ahead, I think Antonioni's cinema both. The viewer is then presented with what Pasolini wonderfully describes as:. Seemingly inherent to the minutiae of everyday experience and the world, this is an ambiguity that floods every image, sequence, and film, linking in inextricable ways the particular reality portrayed on screen and the revolution of feature film form and aesthetics enacted by this director.

Responding to the already familiar description (and frequent criticism) that his cinema was characterised by a coldness, long-time Antonioni champion and scholar Renzo Renzi argued as early as 1957 that such a gaze “is in fact a sign of self-conscious responsibility, aware of the shortfalls of moral judgment and clear annunciations about the reality from which the films emanate. Alternatively, just visit our homepage or navigate to an interesting page by using the links below. The contributors to this volume argue for an understanding of his work in a variety of new contexts: transnational cinema; conceptual photography; intermediality; thing theory; ecological and climate change theory; rubbish theory; microhistorical urbanism; the theory of the picturesque; and the theory of style. Edited by Laura Rascaroli and John. Interstitial, Pretentious, Alienated, Dead: Antonioni at 100/Laura Rascaroli and John David Rhodes Modernities Identification of a City: Antonioni and Rome, 1940-1962/Jacopo Benci Modernity, Put into Form: Blow-Up, Objectuality, 1960s Antonioni/Laura Rascaroli Revisiting Zabriskie Point/Angelo Restivo Reporter, Soldier, Detective, Spy: Watching The Passenger/Robert S. We’re really sorry but an unexpected error has occurred We’re sure it’s not your fault and would like to ask you to try again. The contributors to this volume argue for an understanding of his work in a variety of new contexts: transnational cinema; conceptual photography; intermediality; thing theory; ecological and climate change theory; rubbish theory; microhistorical urbanism; the theory of the picturesque; and the theory of style. Think of the spatial and temporal impact resulting from L’avventura’s placement of privileged post-war figures within both primordial nature and the historic built environment of Sicilia; La notte’s framing of its world-weary middle-aged couple, together and alone, against the diverse architectural surfaces and spaces of Milano and its surrounds; the intimate exchanges of L’eclisse’s protagonist with the environments and textures of a palimpsestic Roma across historic centre and modern periphery; or Il deserto rosso’s variously manipulated colour palette and depth-flattening camerawork visualising the troubled central character’s experience of Ravenna’s industrial region, quay, and centre.

In addition to both exaggerated and denuded colour, out-of-focus and deep-focus shots, flattened depth-of-field (resulting from extensive use of the telephoto lens), and compositions mixing high-tech industry and polluted nature, this also plays out within unhomely, decidedly sterile ultra-modern interiors

The Antonioni that emerges across these essays is an artist profoundly engaged in formal experimentation and deeply embedded in the complexities of his cultural and historical moment, whose work, therefore, continues to offer itself as a rich resource for thinking through the contradictory conditions of late modernity in the twenty-first century. It, Special Antonioni Centenary Issue: “Antonioni and the Mystery of Reality,” Issue 18 July-December 2012. Italian art house cinema and its determined obsession with difficult formal and aesthetic questions has, certainly with the ambit of Italian Film Studies, been sidelined as academics working on Italian film have pursued other agendas. Increasingly, the critical tenor in Antonioni scholarship is to try and avoid or heavily bracket talk of what was once often described as his characters’ primary existential affliction. Merleau-Ponty describes the capacity for “objectively observable behaviour” as a site for meaning, provided that “objectivity is not confused with what is measurable. In extensive interviews at the time of the film’s Italian release, Antonioni did not suggest a clear denunciation of the reality in and around industrial Ravenna so vividly essayed by Il deserto rosso. This description is very precise in emphasising the shift from a “distressingly real” worker’s face to the sheer abstraction of a coloured line.

If the angle of Giovanni’s subsequent gaze out the window suggests the preceding image is not easily understood or recoupable as his point-of-view (if we assume the conventions of continuity editing), the ambiguous combination of these two images demonstrates again the true and quietly confronting intimacy of human and object worlds. The essays included in the second section, ‘Aesthetics’, interrogate Antonioni’s reconfigurations of the concepts of beauty and art. The apogee of Antonioni’s heroines in this regard, Vittoria is an apparent beneficiary of Italy’s post-war economic boom (we glean that her family has poorer origins) and the expanded personal freedoms afforded a new middle class less tethered to the traditions of family and Church than was the case for women and men of the pre- and immediate post-war periods. His intensely stylised, stylish, demanding and gratifying films continue to spark controversy and debate — and inspire intense allegiance. We’re really sorry but an unexpected error has occurred We’re sure it’s not your fault and would like to ask you to try again. ”(48) The majority of Antonioni’s “semi-abstract phenomena,” including his most painterly or abstract images, do not in fact thereby show something strange. Antonioni: Centenary Essays is an exemplary model for writing on cinema and modernity, a timely occasion for rethinking media reception in the twenty-first century through revaluation of Antonioni’s films. As the slowly percolating action develops into an ‘event’, more documentary-like yet immaculately composed images take over the film, framing the graphic attractions of seemingly chaotic movement within an ancient Roman built environment renovated for modern purpose.

Important

This is a book that belongs in the library of every spectator who loves the art of film-making. , New York: Marsilio, 1996, p. This article explores the ways in which Antonioni’s work constitutes a historically embedded, yet still radical cinema in which the filmmaker’s famous modernism and a highly developed form of realism coexist in provocative and generative ways. To treat alienation in any kind of universalising way is a problem (especially in light of the bourgeois socio-economic milieu privileged in Antonioni’s work), but so is being too sure about its implications, how it plays out, and even what it means. Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited, Baker & Taylor, Inc. And yet it is certainly often experienced as an effect, or weapon, of capital and power within the modernity essayed by these films. Arguing against critical views of Antonioni as an anti-humanist filmmaker who treated actors as mere elements of the mise-en-scène, David Forgacs inquires into his directorial practice to re-establish the centrality of acting and performance to his aesthetics. Antonioni’s uncontested status as a modernist master has not been accompanied in recent years by any renewed and invigorating critical interest in his work. Far from a rarefied philosophical issue, Antonioni’s films demonstrate that ambiguity is at the very heart of the modern everyday in all its confusion and provocation. His intensely stylised, stylish, demanding and gratifying films continue to spark controversy and debate – and inspire intense allegiance. Such aesthetic engagement at the heart of this cinematic event both feeds off history and escapes it. (3) Having first entered a concrete-dominated pedestrian and recreation zone with neighbours while looking for a missing dog, the film’s strongly etched yet psychologically elusive protagonist is suddenly alone. (34) In a still more overtly reflexive fashion, formal play with line, focus, texture, bodies – human and otherwise – and above all colour, dominates Il deserto rosso. The viewer is left to pursue other interests that, while seeming new are in fact comprised of the same environment that dominated much of the film. Ground zero in terms of ‘nature’ remains L’avventura’s island. Yet the historically grounded modernist realism, and with the latter film the absolute flattening of distinctions between historical and filmic realities, means that none of these rather tactile, at times seemingly ‘3-D’ or ‘virtual’ images are beyond reality per se. He is a founding co-editor of the journal World Picture.

To treat alienation in any kind of universalising way is a problem (especially in light of the bourgeois socio-economic milieu privileged in Antonioni’s work), but so is being too sure about its implications, how it plays out, and even what it means. There is certainly a lot to be gained from reading Antonioni’s films as precise, deeply embedded historical portraits with much to tell us about Italy’s post-war changes. The Antonioni that emerges across these essays is an artist profoundly engaged in formal experimentation and deeply embedded in the complexities of his cultural and historical moment, whose work, therefore, continues to offer itself as a rich resource for thinking through the contradictory conditions of late modernity in the twenty-first century. And the truth of our daily lives is neither mechanical, conventional nor artificial, as stories generally are, and if films are made that way, they will show it. On the centenary of Antonioni’s birth, this volume places his work in an expanded field in order to reassess his contribution and continued centrality to world cinema. ﻿The contributors to Antonioni: Centenary Essays approach the director’s works with fresh, new inspiration and contemporary critical methodologies that underscore Antonioni’s continued relevance to the cinema of our day, adding numerous original insights on such topics as Antonioni’s documentaries, his relationship to Rome, and his last films, while providing fresh perspectives on the classics of the Antonioni canon, such as L’avventura, Red Desert, and Blow-Up. Laura Rascaroli’s piece explores ‘the uncanny significance of the object’ in the director’s representation of modernity, and identifies Blow-Up (1966) as a ‘proto-postmodern’ work that marks a turning point in his discourse on ‘objectuality’. Pascal Bonitzer, “The Disappearance on Antonioni”, trans.

As articulated in the epigraph quote at the top of this article, this means that in its classical Hollywood narrative, Italian neorealist, documentary, or politically revolutionary forms, realism no longer appears realistic in terms of what its shows and how. LAURA RASCAROLI﻿is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at University College Cork. The images of L’eclisse’s seven-minute concluding sequence comprise a freshly dripping canvas offering up the challenge, or chance, to wash away our memories of the recognisably human, by looking directly upon the phenomenal world by means of the camera’s ‘documentary’ or ‘experimental’ presentation of material space transforming through time. The Antonioni that emerges across these essays is an artist profoundly . Another striking example is when, with far greater attention than initially afforded the human bodies that will become the film’s central characters, Il deserto rosso lingers on huge eruptions of steam (recalling the film’s first post-credits shot of what looks like poisonous gas billowing into the air) emanating from an entirely ‘artificial’ landscape as if from a primordial fissure in the earth’s crust. This brief, enigmatic moment I have described from Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) is an entirely typical interlude within the Italian director’s remarkable, long shadow-casting cinema. Each shot in L’eclisse, for example, has an undeniable solidity and clarity in its rendering of a specific material reality within Roma’s various inner and outer regions (plus the small Verona airport where Vittoria enjoys a lyrical interlude), all the time emanating ambiguity’s ubiquitous vapours. The apogee of Antonioni’s heroines in this regard, Vittoria is an apparent beneficiary of Italy’s post-war economic boom (we glean that her family has poorer origins) and the expanded personal freedoms afforded a new middle class less tethered to the traditions of family and Church than was the case for women and men of the pre- and immediate post-war periods.

At the May 1960 Cannes festival premiere of L’avventura, the audience infamously jeered and shouted at the screen, before a second screening was arranged following a petition circulated by Rossellini, Janine Bazin and other European cinema luminaries declaring the film’s importance

Subjective can refer to the psyche of the character, or to that of the camera, the film’s mute narrator, or to both concurrently. Taking a more ‘auteurist’ line, we may of course seek to interpret La notte’s refusal to take us inside this would-be couple’s temporary adulterous bubble for what it might suggest of Lidia’s individual frustrations, or the class she represents. The apogee of Antonioni’s heroines in this regard, Vittoria is an apparent beneficiary of Italy’s post-war economic boom (we glean that her family has poorer origins) and the expanded personal freedoms afforded a new middle class less tethered to the traditions of family and Church than was the case for women and men of the pre- and immediate post-war periods. By its closely embedded historical nature, Antonioni’s project necessitates a remaking of realism. ’ The essays collected in this volume reappraise the centrality and continuing influence of Antonioni’s unique, demanding, and controversial language to world filmmakers. Responding to the already familiar description (and frequent criticism) that his cinema was characterised by a coldness, long-time Antonioni champion and scholar Renzo Renzi argued as early as 1957 that such a gaze “is in fact a sign of self-conscious responsibility, aware of the shortfalls of moral judgment and clear annunciations about the reality from which the films emanate. The familiar EUR street corner and milieu now emerge as an ever-modulating set of material facts, the contours of which are changing beyond recognition before our eyes.